Introduction: maritime introspections Gabriel N. Gee and Caroline Wiedmer Janus, the two-headed God, looks out and looks in. Down the Palatine hill in Rome, next to the church of San Giorgio in Velabro, not far from where Romulus and Remus were said to have been found by the she-wolf, stands the Arch of Janus Quadrifrons. It was erected in the early fourth century under the reign of Constantine, at the northeastern tip of the Forum Boarium, the cattle market of ancient Rome. Sixteen metres high and twelve metres wide, with an archway on each of its four sides, this arch of Janus served as a mon- ument and a gateway to the commercial centre of the Roman capital. The Forum Boarium dates back to the time of the Republic and is strategically located between the Palatine, Capitoline and Aventine hills, and the Tiber River. Janus, the God of passageways, of going in and out, was venerated in Rome from time immemorial. In the Forum Romanum, the temple of Janus geminus had been consecrated by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, in the seventh century BCE. Its door remained open in times of war, and closed, if only very rarely, in times of peace. The God with two faces, one looking outwards, the other looking inwards, presided over the fortunes of a growing territorial and commercial empire. As it was required to chan- nel increasing amounts of goods to feed the capital, the Portus Tiberinus, built under Servius Tullius in the sixth century next to the Forum Boarium, became congested. The seven hills are situated some twenty miles inland from the sea. In the first century BCE, the fortress at Ostia on the coast was further developed into a city. The need for a deep harbour port remained, and under the reign of Claudius digging eventually commenced.1 The Portus, 1 Jason Urbanus, ‘Rome’s Imperial Port’, Archaeology March/April 2015, accessed 2 June 2019, https://www.archaeology.org/issues/168-1503/features/2971-rome-portus-rise-of-em- pire#art_page6. 12 Gabriel N� Gee and Caroline Wiedmer Rome’s harbour, was developed just north of Ostia. Two gigantic moles were built into the sea to protect the inner basin. Trajan, in the second century CE, added an artificial hexagonal basin that could accommodate another two hundred vessels. A canal connected the port to the Tiber and to the inner city. In the Vatican, a sixteenth-century fresco depicts the imperial harbour from above, with its geometric complex of palaces and warehouses surrounding the hexagonal core and the spherical outreach onto the sea. The Portus was a strategic infrastructural feat, as well as a symbol of Roman might for all visitors. On an artificial island between the two moles, a lighthouse signalled the entrance to the harbour. Out, into the imperial routes and networks; in, to the hinterland and the million-strong inhabitants of its capital. With the fall of Rome in the fifth-century the Portus was progressively abandoned. The figure of Janus, however, has remained a looming presence on European coastlines. The voyages launched in the fifteenth century to circumvent the African continent and cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of Indian markets metaphorically revived the divinity’s double gaze. European port cities grew as privileged gateways to foreign wealth and inner splen- dour. No longer confined to coastal navigation, Spanish caravels and Dutch fluyt roamed the oceans in search of spices, gold and slaves. With the devel- opment of lens technology, the lighthouses that were built at the thresholds of port cities – from the seventy-six-metre lanterna di Genoa to the Gothic brick tower of Bremerhaven, from the Brandaris lighthouse perched on Tersehlling island in Friesland to the Bellem lighthouse at the mouth of the Tagus – have endorsed the role of Janus beaming in and out to safely bring sailors to and fro. Industrialisation in the nineteenth century furthered the European hold on global markets, as the lighthouse shone stronger than ever before, thanks to the adoption of the Fresnel lens.2 In the past fifty years, however, European port cities have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and identities. The introduction of the standardised container in the 1960s contributed to the acceleration of global interconnectedness, while simultaneously introducing a caesura within port cities as container terminals were developed out of the urban 2 Theresa Levitt, A short bright flash: Augustin Fresnel and the birth of the modern lighthouse (New York, London: Norton, 2013). Introduction: maritime introspections 13 core to accommodate new transportation vessels.3 In Europe, the shift took place in parallel with the global decentralisation of major maritime indus- trial assets, bringing economic downturn and social hardship to many har- bour cities. Nevertheless, these metamorphoses can also be seen as having opened a path to emancipation from a formerly narcissistic relation to the sea and the world beyond: European port cities could gain a capacity to see the Other within themselves, thereby potentially undermining the self-cen- tred perspective that had nurtured colonial expansionism.4 Artistic prac- tices engaging with maritime heritage have been noteworthy for articulating such an alternate set of aspirations, and for creating a multipolar identity for the European port city of the twenty-first century. If the seventeenth and eighteenth-century seascapes could capture and represent so strikingly the changing networks of European trade and political outreach, the late twen- tieth century witnessed a diversification of aesthetic perspectives on ports and the sea, exploring a range of critical and poetic interventions through various media. The present collection of essays explores facets of this intro- spective turn. Continental epiphanies: the inward gaze of Narcissus European port cities developed long-distance networks in the ill-named ‘Age of Discoveries’. From Lisbon and Cadiz, Amsterdam, London and Stock- holm, vessels sailed to the Americas and the South China Sea. In parallel, the Renaissance saw the adoption of a new pictorial construction based on a mathematical system throughout Europe. The window onto the world, how- ever, tended to serve as the projection of an inner vision, which commanded a powerful normative framing of the world. The encounter with the Other beyond the seas was thus largely undermined by a self-belief that could work 3 Martin Stopford, Maritime economics (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3d ed.; Marc Levinson, The box: how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger (Princ- eton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Brian Hoyle, ‘Global and local change on the port city waterfront’, Geographical Review Vol. 90, no. 3 (July 2000), 395-417. 4 For a developed discussion of narcissism and the port city, see Gabriel N. Gee, ‘Beyond Nar- cissus. The metamorphosis of port cities in the 20th century’, in Gabriel N. Gee & Alison Vo- gelaar, Changing Representations of Nature and the City: The 1960s-70s and their Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2019). 14 Gabriel N� Gee and Caroline Wiedmer against an understanding and appreciation of difference and dissimilar viewpoints. This infatuation was broken in the 1960s, in the opening of a ‘Beyond Narcissus’.5 The normative gaze of modernity came into question, as did the binary separation of nature and culture it had promoted.6 In Ovid’s tale of Narcissus, the boy who fell in love with his own reflection, there comes a moment, right before he drowns, when Narcissus realises his mistake. He sees suddenly that it is himself he has been looking at with adoring eyes. The cosmological crisis that engulfed Europe in the aftermath of World War II prompted an inward turn, a questioning of identity that implied a critical enquiry into national self-beliefs. The introspective gaze that emerged in European politics, philosophy and aesthetics at the turn of the 1960s was accompanied by a psychological retreat from the seas. For one thing, deco- lonialising movements shifted Europeans’ gaze from overseas to their own shores, where generations of migration and exchange had been shaping increasingly hybrid societies. Secondly, if the standardisation of shipping containers begun in the 1960s obeyed the logic of maritime efficiency, it also shifted the attention of port cities away from the seas to the hinterlands. The gaze of Narcissus turned from the water below, and his own reflection, to the earth beneath his feet.7 Three sites command the iconological regime of this introspective Nar- cissus: the coast, the port city and the hinterland. Coasts have long been inhabited by humans; coastal communities were among the first human set- tlements, benefiting from a combination of fishing and shell picking in the sea, and silvan and agrarian cultivation on land.8 In the twentieth century, human populations throughout the world have converged on coastal areas 5 Gabriel N. Gee, ‘Beyond Narcissus: the metamorphosis of the port city in the 20th centu- ry’, in Gabriel N. Gee & Alison Vogelaar, Changing Representations of Nature and the City: The 1960s-70s and their Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2019), 25-39. 6 Among major studies that have explored this rupture, see Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symmétrique (Paris: La découverte, 2006); Philippe Desco- la, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 7 Our attention to the inner territories was triggered by Paolo Perulli, who suggested con- sidering an inversion of the Narcissus gaze at a TETI 2014 workshop on changing repre- sentations of nature and the city, and prompted a further reflection with artists on this inward-looking continental Narcissus. 8 John R. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 33-35. Introduction: maritime introspections 15 in unprecedented numbers.9 The pleasures of a leisured life spent on the sea- side had emerged already in the nineteenth century, alongside intensifying industrialisation.